What is in The Economic Stimulus Bill of 2009? - Part V

I want to bring to your attention a list of Projected Jobs by Congressional District. Then, Kaiser has a web page of total unemployment rates, the total residents per state, the poverty rate of each state and even the breakdown of citizenship status by state.

Center for American Progress interactive map on which states would get how much of the Stimulus money per Gross State Product (GSP).

Does this distribution make sense? Let's take the case of Michigan. According to the Projected Stimulus jobs per Congressional District, the break down is as follows:

Michigan 109,000 Projected Jobs Created

  • Congressional District 1 Michigan 7,400
  • Congressional District 2 Michigan 7,900
  • Congressional District 3 Michigan 8,000
  • Congressional District 4 Michigan 7,900
  • Congressional District 5 Michigan 7,400
  • Congressional District 6 Michigan 7,700
  • Congressional District 7 Michigan 7,900
  • Congressional District 8 Michigan 8,500
  • Congressional District 9 Michigan 7,800
  • Congressional District 10 Michigan 8,400
  • Congressional District 11 Michigan 8,300
  • Congressional District 12 Michigan 7,200
  • Congressional District 13 Michigan 6,600
  • Congressional District 14 Michigan 6,700
  • Congressional District 15 Michigan 8,500

Here is a map of Michigan's Congressional Districts:
MI congressional Districts

 

Congressional districts are evenly distributed by Population. But does that correspond to actual unemployment rates?

To see a county by county breakdown of Michigan unemployment statistics and map, click this BLS link.

Detroit Michigan is in Wayne County, which has an unemployment rate of 11.7%.

Another example is California 44th district. the 44th is getting the most jobs per district of any in California. Notice the Demographics or Riverside, California, where estimates of illegal workers is at 7%. Also the foreclosure rate is one of the highest and while ITIN default numbers are low, is this a valid metric due to so much identity theft and fraud within the industry?

I am not saying it is or it is not but I will say that examining this issue honestly with objective statistics, including fake and stolen documents is in order. Hiding some issue due to a political objective or philosophy ain't gonna give one objective data to base solutions on.

Other provisions in the Stimulus:

Buy American

Sirota reports:

First, the Buy America provisions survived the conference committee and remain in the stimulus package. These provisions, which were vehemently opposed by multinational corporate lobbyists, encourage government agencies to purchase American-made goods in spending the stimulus money, so as to make sure the money creates as big an economic multiplier effect for our economy as possible.

Second, I'm told by Capitol Hill sources that the Sanders-Grassley amendment prohibiting bailed-out banks from using taxpayer money to outsource jobs remains in the final bill. The amendment followed the Associated Press's report that many banks were using the cash in conjunction with their ongoing efforts to abuse the H-1B program and outsource information sector jobs. Here's a list of banks receiving bailout money - ie. banks that will no longer be able to use that money to subsidize offshoring.

It is true the corporate lobbyists and other special interests were all over, well, pretty much anything that put Stimulus money into the hands of U.S. workers.

Prosperous America has a great report on the many loopholes of the Buy American provisions. Note, to date I am unaware of any provision which requires services, software to be designed or work performed by U.S. citizens, legal residents. In other words, nothing to stop these contracts from being offshore outsourced.

Executive Pay

Sneaky Senator Dodd (who is a large recipient of financial lobbyist money), managed to get into the Stimulus stricter rules on TARP recipient executive pay:

The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign into law next week, limits bonuses for executives at all financial institutions receiving government funds to no more than a third of their annual compensation. The bonuses must be paid in company stock that can be redeemed only when the government investment has been repaid. With the measure, lawmakers seek to address public outrage over extravagant Wall Street paydays even as taxpayers bail out the industry.

Unlike the rules issued by the White House, the limits in the stimulus bill would apply to top executives and the highest-paid employees at all 359 banks that have already received government aid.

Yet now there are reports that the administration and Congress are at odds over these new limits in the Stimulus.

Broadband

It appears that Verizon had a 20% tax cut cut in the nick of time since it would have applied just to that one company for high broadband speeds.

New York-based Verizon’s fiber-optic Internet service, known as FiOS, was the only U.S. broadband system that could have offered Web access at the speeds required for the 20 percent tax credit, Zufolo said. Other broadband providers had raised concerns about that speed requirement, and lawmakers probably didn’t have time to resolve the issue during this week’s fast- paced stimulus negotiations, she said.

Now grants which would encourage smaller companies are all that is available.

Training & Education

Pell grants, which are grants to assist with college increased $500 dollars along with more tax breaks for college.

Yet retraining received $4 billion dollars.

Not a word about offshore outsourcing in these U.S. taxpayer funded projects or use of guest workers or illegal labor. There are many Americans with the skills already. They do not need to be retrained but instead we need US corporations to hire US workers for US projects.

For example, Intel offshore outsources and uses massive guest worker Visas yet wants part of government contracts for medical technology. IBM, Google, also notorious for offshore outsourcing, are seemingly trying to get a piece of the government pie on modernizing health records. Intel gets some kudos for investing $7 billion in advanced U.S. manufacturing, yet IBM is now demanding it's own employees work for Indian wages in India.

Isn't the entire point of Stimulus to stimulate a domestic economy using temporary government expenditures? Somehow shipping that money abroad for more offshore outsourcing doesn't sound too stimulative.

The Associated Press has more on what made it into the final bill.

Previous Posts on the Stimulus

What's in the Stimulus Bill? Part IV.

What's in the Stimulus Bill? Part III.

What's in the Stimulus Bill" Part II.

What's in the Stimulus Bill? Part I.

Final Bill That was Signed into Law

Conference report to accompany H.R. 1

H.R. 1

This is the final bill that was signed. It's called the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.

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Comments

Remarkably egalitarian

Just spot-checking that jobs created, I'd have to say we ended up with almost no correlation to unemployment rate- but a remarkably low spread per congressional district nationwide. The numbers seem (and I haven't crunched the heavy math) to be between 6000-9000 jobs created per district, with a median of about 7500. Given the spread, and the accusations of "pork" thrown out, I'm pretty amazed at those numbers.

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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.

districts by population

I haven't checked every district and some have historically high unemployment rates, but it seems so "equal" to the point it seems unequal to what projects make sense as well as where the real unemployment is.

We know Detroit is economic disaster ground zero and it's looking so bad for the big 3 auto companies, I expect that rate to spike up much worst than it already is.

Then, if 25% of the jobs to be created are in the tech sector, we have a major issue not being talked about and that is offshore outsourcing. I am hoping a real expert on Buy American can address software design, services but I have been hunting high and low on that topic and I do not believe it is covered under those provisions.

As usual, it seems the geek community and their labor issues is getting ignored.

'Nother response

Just because I happen to have some close friends in AmberGlen Hillsboro, OR Intel Campus, while likely there are many H-1b's on the project, Digital Health is indeed primarily centered here in Oregon, at least for the major development team & localization (translation to foreign languages) of the user interface & manuals.

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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.

Intel

#14 on the H-1B Visa list but I do not know precisely what percentage of it's workforce is on guest workers (H-1B, L-1, etc.) but we do absolutely know that IBM is offshore outsourcing contracts, jobs as fast as they can and Intel has many facilities offshore.

IBM is one of the worst. Over and over they get state tax incentives to create jobs....and they take the money...and do not create local jobs.

Google is offshore as well.

From what I've seen

and this is just a guess, from the pattern of ethnic restaurants in the area, that in the 1990s, Intel went about 25% H-1b and stayed at about that ratio since. Agriculture in the area has since gone 90%-100% illegal- and all of the tandoori houses closed in the last 4 years and reopened as Mexican places.

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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.

careful

don't make assumptions based on restaurants, etc. I happen to love Indian food and it's a real bitch to cook too, it's quite popular among engineers generally. Yummy. Then that area is Silicon forest, so we have no idea what other activities are in the area. Is Infosys, TCS, operating there? (probably). So, we can go by the many horrific employment reports from Intel, the fact they hide their layoffs with an absurd perpetual "flunk out class" from the jobs (which Enron adopted, so lovely!), their H-1b applications, the use of L-1 and their offshore outsourcing activity.

Same with Hillsboro Demographics. Sure it looks like Mexigon but one really needs to find out the current population survey and percentages.